WaPo: Rape in the storage room. Groping at the bar. Why is the restaurant industry so terrible for women?

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Article is from 2 days ago but just saw it pop up on my fb feed. Going through it now and it is eerily accurate. I worked at 2 restaurants and it was insane how normalized sexual harrasement was. Last restaurant I worked at was especially horrifying. The manager only hired pretty women as hostesses solely so he had something to look at and often talked about the ways he could sneak a peak at women whenever he was at the gym. The chef was a complete asshole. He would go out of his way to harass women including telling us while they were out of the kitchen on how to assault them. Like he straight up did a tutorial on how to brush your back against their boobs. And in general they showed like no respect to any of the female employees. I remember bringing it up to my coworkers and no one thought anything was wrong.

If you’re a woman, what makes a restaurant dangerous isn’t the sharp knives or the hot griddle: It’s an isolated area of the kitchen, like the dry storage pantry.

That’s where Miranda Rosenfelt, 31, then a cook at Jackie’s restaurant in Silver Spring, was headed one day seven years ago to help out with inventory, at the request of one of her direct supervisors, who she says had been harassing her for months. When she walked into the narrow basement room, far from the bustle of the kitchen, she turned around to find him “standing there with his pants on the floor, and his penis in his hands,” blocking her exit from the basement, she said.